Reading Slavery: From This World to Futures Imagined
This course serves as an introduction to the histories, theories, philosophies, and aesthetic representations of Black enslavement from the American Reconstruction to the contemporary moment. The emergence and expansion of Black enslavement under the auspices of racial capitalism was as much a social, cultural, political, and environmental process as it was an economic one. As such, this course will engage with archival documents, social phenomenon, literary texts, and multimedia representations and engagements with enslavement. This is a reading intensive course that assumes no familiarity with the topic; we will stretch across the Black Atlantic, looking to the Caribbean, North America, Latin America, and parts of Africa.
This course is the second part of the two-part course called “Reading Slavery.” Part one, “Reading Slavery: From the New World to This One” fulfills the pre-1860 requirement for the major. Part two, “Reading Slavery: From This World to Futures Unimagined” will be taught in the spring and fulfills the post-1860 requirement for the major.
Sample Texts:
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Kindred (the graphic novel) by Octavia Butler
Underground (TV Series)
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
The Red Record by Ida B. Wells
The Black Book by Toni Morrison
Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
The Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Sample Assignment:
In groups, choose one theme and put together your own 10 page The Black Book, picking up where Morrison left off. There should be a span of kinds of texts (archival, literary, banal, decade-defining, everything in between) and it should be organized chronologically. Pay special attention to the politics of your choice: why do you choose what you do? Why do you choose to place them where you do? After putting it together with your groups and sharing with other groups, individually record yourself responding to another group’s Black Book. What stands out? What do you feel? What shocks you?